Fanny Blake

Signed and dated l.r.: F. Blake 1849, inscribed on original mount in pencil: And on the darkest clouds of woe/he sets his covenanted bow/Patterdale, inscribed on original backboard in ink: Patterdale Churchyard by F. Blake and Blake 3665, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out, a Vokins framing stamp on the backboard, a label inscribed Drawing Room attached to the backboardProvenanceBy descent in the Blake family to Major-General Mark Bond, OBE (1922-2017), Moigne Combe, Dorset;By family descent at Moigne Combe until 2019Fanny (Frances) Blake was the sister of Frederick Rudolph Blake of Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the great-grandfather of H.M.G. Bond and E.M.G. Williams.She was an extremely talented pupil of Peter de Wint and is singled out for special mention in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ of 1851, in a review of an exhibition of the work of amateur watercolorists as an ‘accomplished artist, admirable for truth, completeness and delicacy’.This watercolour is a record of the previous church of St Patrick at Patterdale which dated from the 14th century and was extensively rebuilt around 1620, known to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Turner. A new church was built at Patterdale by Salvin in the early 1850s after a storm destroyed the building depicted here. The ancient yew tree in this work, thought to have dated back to the Norman Conquest, was destroyed in a storm in 1883.